Asphalt Eden

One technique I often use to lull myself to sleep [I have never had trouble sleeping, and I am often asleep four or five minutes after I close my eyes—I'm able to tell from the music playing when we sleep], is a mental tour of some past residence or place I have been. In the spring, the odors of exploding nature bring me back to trips to visit my grandfather in his Florida townhome, and so, this time of year, I tour his house in my mind and fall asleep by the time I make it to the guest bedroom within.

The year before he died, the guest room had changed considerably, his Vietnamese live-in girlfriend (my step-father, a vet, suspects she was a prostitute during the war, which is as salacious and intriguing an imagining as anything I could conjure) filling it with portraits of herself and of her family, and all of the familiar furniture had been removed. All semblance of what I had remembered (a settee overlooking the canal, a couch where I'd watch movies on the little television) was gone, save a fold-out bed for me to sleep on. His office had been moved to another room in the house, and everything once-known was impossible to parse in the original ways. The house in the moments before sleep is unchanged, though, and I can almost hear my grandmother's voice, and the little radio she used to play (this must be a compound memory of when they lived upstairs from us in my childhood home), and the sound of a Norelco electric razor.

The radio station she listened to is of the sort that no longer exists—the one-thousand strings of Mantovani shamelessly co-opting island themes and rhythms experienced by WWII servicemen in the forties have fallen silent. I recall we also used to listen to radio dramas on the same transistor set in the early 1980s, while playing pinochle, and though I know it is not an imagining, it still seems unbelievable.

I read the new Glenn Ganges comic book on the train yesterday. It seemed to me to be about our inherent social incapability to adequately communicate in person to others the complexity of our internal lives, but it may also just have been about experiences during the dot-com boom. A high-school friend of mine made a lot of money in those years, and she hadn't even finished college. She had expensive clothes and makeup. Sometimes I dream about her and she has a designer drug habit and a tasteless, glassy modern home on the cliffs of the Hudson.

When hearing of her success, I remember wondering why I'd decided to go down the road of a writing degree. At this time I cannot even remember my original reasoning, why I wanted to write in the first place. Well, perhaps it is not that. It is not about wanting to write—I simply write, and the act is done. But I can't remember why I felt it necessary to lock in writing as "what I do." I'm not sure where the thought came from, and possible origins recede further and further away with time. I think it is just the same as if I had majored in "undeclared." Being an editor is being the college professor of that graduate program, a Mastery in the Undeclared.

I feel terrible for children today who live their lives on the internet. I am shy enough that so much of my own development of the last few years has been written down for all to see, the warts and the lesions, and the thought of having my pre-teen and teen years on display, all of the drama and histrionics, would be too much for me to bear.

I'm doing my open water dives in Pennsylvania this weekend, so I'll be officially certified on Sunday. Next week we have tickets to go see Stars of the Lid. I'm reading Rhialto the Marvelous. I highly recommend the album Umber by Parks. I am expecting a restorative summer.